Unbeknownst to many, Joomla actually has includes a feature to add and edit weblinks from the frontend.  However, it is seldom used because the core layouts do not include "add" or "edit" links in the layouts.  Fortunately, using Joomla's layout override system, those links are not hard to add.  This tutorial shows you how to add and edit link to the weblinks listed in a category view and also add a link to submit a weblink.

This video looks at the many of the changes in Joomla 1.6 that developers need to be aware of as presented by Andrew Eddie on 15 May 2010, a few days before the Beta 1 release.  This is part 3 of 3 in a series of in-depth talks on Joomla 1.6.

This video looks at the new access controls (user groups and permissions) in Joomla 1.6 as presented by Andrew Eddie on 15 May 2010, a few days before the Beta 1 release.  This is part 2 of 3 in a series of in-depth talks on Joomla 1.6.

The RODE USB Podcaster mic is an excellent choice for anyone wanting to improve the audio quality of their podcasting recordings.  In this quick review I look at the quality of the mic compared to a headset and built-in laptop mic.  I'm really happy with the results and the purchase.

This video looks at what's new in Joomla 1.6 for site administrators as presented by Andrew Eddie on 15 May 2010, a few days before the Beta 1 release. This is part 1 of 3 in a series of in-depth talks on Joomla 1.6.

If you’ve ever worked on an existing website, chances are you’ve run into a directory listing like the following:

Copy of index.html
about.html
contact.html
favicon.ico
index.html
index.html.bak
index.html.bak2
index.html.old
pricing.html

It’s also quite possible you are responsible for having created a mess like this. We’re always told to make backups of our files, and so we make them, often right next to the files of a live site. While it’s a good idea to make a backup of your code before changing something that already works, .bak, .old, and .other files can accumulate very quickly.

Made-up extensions like .bak tell us (let alone others) very little about the significance of each change. It would be nice if there were some way of keeping a history of every change made to a file. Better still, tracking who made each change would be useful. And a way of combining changes from two different copies of the same file would be fantastic.

Fortunately, such systems already exist.

I've heard a lot of talk lately about whether or not Joomla can handle large-scale websites, or if it's best used for small mom-and-pop sites. I can say emphatically that the answer to that question is that Joomla is not only useful for small mom-and-pop sites, but it can also be used to build it medium and large-scale sites. There are a few popular examples of large-scale websites built with Joomla, and two developers have been involved in a number of these sites: Mitch Pirtle from Space Monkey Labs and Fotis Evangelou from Komrade and JoomlaWorks. In this 2-part series, I am interviewing both Mitch and Fotis to get their insights on what it takes to deploy large-scale websites with Joomla. Part 1 is my interview with Mitch.

Good day,

Waaaaaay back in January, I took the time in this column to discuss with you the concept and need to patch your site. Since that article was written till now (May 16, 2010) there has been about 180 report vulnerabilities for Joomla extensions. And some number of them for the Joomla core (to be fair only a few).

Given that you might be using one of these, its important to revisit this highly important topic.

Have you ever browsed to a website only to find that half the content is unreadable? Or that certain characters are being displayed in strange and mysterious ways? Or perhaps you wanted to enter a foreign or unusual character but found that the result was a garbled mess.

The chances are you have been subject to poorly managed character encodings. Joomla! extensions are no exception to these occurrences, but with a little bit of effort and some help from the Joomla! framework, we can avoid these problems with relative ease.

We are pleased to announce the beta launch of our new Joomla! template framework, /motif. Actually, it's not that new. We built /motif back in October of 2009 for our own purposes.

/motif is a template development framework for Joomla! built to simplify the development of fully-custom Joomla! templates and empower web designers to become Joomla! template developers. We are Joomla! template designers and developers, and we built /motif in October 2009 to "scratch our own itch." We needed a simple, robust, and flexible template framework with a non-restrictive license so we could use it on all of the custom templates we build for our clients. Unfortunately, none of the frameworks available at the time quite fit what we needed, so we built our own.

This framework will be the basis of a new Joomla! template club called Themeables, which we will be officially launching at CMS Expo in May. Head over to the Themeables website and grab a copy of /motif for yourself. The framework is free (as in freedom and as in beer). If you want to learn more about /motif, check out the /motif documentation.

In recent months, there have been a few issues in the Joomla community and with Joomla's leadership that have caused some people to get upset with how decisions are made and with the lack of communication between the leadership team and the community over certain decisions. Steve Burge has formed a team to address these issues and come up with a solution for better communication with the community. You can read about this new initiative on Joomla.org. If you have a moment, please take some time to read through Steve's post and fill out the form at the end of the post to share your ideas. {jomcomment lock}

There is no secret to becoming a Joomla rockstar. In fact, it's really easy if you think about it. Here are 3 (yes, 3) easy steps to becoming a Joomla rockstar:

Step 1: Build a website with Joomla.

Step 2: Learn from your mistakes.

Step 3: Repeat steps 1 and 2.

Dear Open Source Matters,

I've noticed a lot of controversy brewing over your recent announcement that you've hired a PR firm to drive awareness of the Joomla project. This is a tough issue with excellent points on both sides. There is clearly a need for better PR for Joomla. This situation, ironically, is a perfect example of that need. There is also clearly a need for more community involvement and input in decisions like this. Jen Kramer makes some excellent points about this in her recent blog post "VOXUS's first PR problem for Joomla".

But the PR situation isn't really why I am writing this. There have been other situations like this in recent months that have caused similar outrage and upheaval in the community, and I'm afraid something gets lost in all of this. Most of us truly appreciate you and the work that you are doing to advance Joomla as a project and as a community. We may disagree with some of your decisions and actions, but we appreciate the countless hours you spend free of charge working to help make Joomla the best it can be. It is a thankless job that most of us can't or won't do for one reason or another, so thank you for taking the time to do it.

Whether we agree or disagree on matters of policy or decisions that you have made, at the end of the day we are still a community. My sincere hope is that none of us lose sight of that.

Respectfully,
Cory Webb

Session storage is a very important aspect of web applications. In its simplest form, a PHP session allows data to be stored temporarily on the server and accessed throughout a user's time on the site. When that user leaves the site or is inactive for a certain amount of time, the data is destroyed. While anonymous sessions are common, sessions are usually associated with user logins. When a correct username/password combination is entered, a session is created around that user's access information and then read and checked every time that user loads a page. As a developer, you can access this session functionality to enhance your extensions.

Debugging PHP applications has always been a bit of a challenge, as the environment is so distributed. At the minimum, there is a web server, the PHP interpreter, and the web browser. While there are tools that add debugging environments to PHP (such as XDebug), you don’t always have access to install them on the server you’re working with.

Fortunately, you can gain some reasonable debugging capabilities through FirePHP. When you want to dump objects or variables back to your browser without having to do so in your HTML, FirePHP is ready for the task. It can also be used to handle code traces and PHP errors.

FirePHP is both a Firebug extension and a PHP library. When the PHP library is in place, special HTTP headers containing JSON objects are created. Firebug reads the HTTP headers, decodes the JSON, then shows the variables in the console. Since the output body is unaffected, it is extremely useful for debugging XML, JSON, PDFs, images, or other non-HTML output generated in PHP.